Forum:2017-10-02 (Monday)
Discussion for comic for . Enjoying this wiki? Help to update it. ---- And, indeed, there are . Argadi (talk) 09:52, October 2, 2017 (UTC) : In that case, the current trophy holder is in the race too. What happens if they end up being the winner? dum-dum-DOOOOOM! LittleAlvinMaker (talk) 12:38, October 2, 2017 (UTC) ::: Presumably their snail rider tries hard to lose. But the whole story has such an absurdist flavor that it seems pointless to pick nits. I mean, they could just do a plain round-robin. Or set up a steering committee of one person from each family; that wouldn't be any more contentious than a single crime family. But I don't understand panel 3; were they wiped out for telling bad jokes? Bkharvey (talk) 14:47, October 2, 2017 (UTC) :::: Notice the glowing symbol behind the joke teller. They were wiped out by Heterodyne created construct for telling bad jokes about a Heterodyne. Argadi (talk) 15:18, October 2, 2017 (UTC) Hey, that the Heterodyne Boys "wouldn't even bequeath the snail." This suggests that the snail was important to the underworld before the Boys. But today Van says that the use of the snail was an adaptation to being forced underground. I'm confused. Bkharvey (talk) 01:52, October 3, 2017 (UTC) : Today says passing control of the snail was an adaptation. It doesn't say the snail was created for that purpose. (Which leaves open the question of who controlled the snail before that.) Argadi (talk) 09:55, October 3, 2017 (UTC) ::: Right, who controlled the snail originally? Greenclaw seems to imply that the practice of giving the snail to one of the families predates the Boys. Why does that make sense? Given a time when the Heterodyne was in charge of the underground activities, why wouldn't he keep the snail himself? Otherwise it doesn't make sense for there to be a central control box in the first place. (There isn't one for the Muses, as far as we know.) OTOH the Heterodyne keeping a central control box helps make sense of him gifting the Sins to the families in the first place, which is otherwise hard to undersand, since they were made specifically to be a set, bigger than the Storm King's set. Bkharvey (talk) 15:42, October 3, 2017 (UTC) Eleven sins, each family given one. Which means at most eleven families. (There could have been more sins than families--the goal of "more than nine" wasn't based on the number of families.) * The Svarkas were wiped out by their own sin. * Two families have been destroyed for not giving up the snail. * Some have intermarried, so that decreased the count by at least one. The (presumed) Assistant says there were six missing families, but there could have been 9, 10, or 11 families, 4, 5 of 6 missing. And zero, one, or two additional intermarriages or cases where families died off. From the wording I'd guess at least one more intermarriage. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Heterodynes kept one of the eleven. Argadi (talk) 09:55, October 3, 2017 (UTC) Other things of note: *Van recovers the secret document in panel 2. *Cheyenne seems to have read my complaint about the shading of the walls. :-) *Why does Van look so manic in panel 7 but not the others? (Okay, nitpicking.) *We haven't heard of the Svarkas before, have we? Will they turn out to be important in the main story? *The facial expressions in panel 1, I've just noticed, suggest that Van is being sarcastic when he calls the Sins a "gift"; they must have functioned more as a way for the Heterodyne to keep control over the families. If so, that explains why it's a big deal who controls the control box. And it makes Greenclaw's use of the word "bequeath" more sensible. OTOH, it means that the feature of the Sin killing anyone who keeps the box more than a year must have been a post-Boys redesign. *If a family is killed, either for retaining the box or for bad jokes, some other family has to take over whichever branch of criminality they controlled. I bet that's why there has to be someone in overall charge. *Ivo is still drinking whatever he can get his hands on. This is part of the hardboiled-detective pastiche; in all the original stories, the detectives drink quite a lot. Hard to understand how they can detect with their brains so impaired, but they do. Bkharvey (talk) 15:42, October 3, 2017 (UTC) Good points. I'd like to add: Whoever has the snail now needs to worry about the one-year possession limit. Oh, and the item being passed back in frame 6 doesn't look like a snail. Argadi (talk) 19:17, October 3, 2017 (UTC) :: Right! Pre-Boys, there was no reason to disguise it. So I'm back to not understanding why Greenclaw said that about bequeathing the snail; there was no snail back then! Bkharvey (talk) 20:45, October 3, 2017 (UTC) :: Oh, wait! Whoever has it now doesn't have to worry about the one-year limit, because s/he is planning to have all the Sins kill all the other families and then self-destruct. That's the point of the theft, I bet. Bkharvey (talk) 20:50, October 3, 2017 (UTC) :: ... And plus, what happens if some non-crime-family rider decides to enter the race? And maybe wins? Bkharvey (talk) 00:47, October 4, 2017 (UTC)